Students spend hours doing homework causing high amounts of stress; is all the homework helpful and worth it?
An opinion on the importance of homework is that homework reinforces skills learned in class and encourages students to take responsibility for their work according to Scholastic .
Another argument that homework is important is that it helps students learn outside of the classroom and teaches students to use different resources such as libraries to learn. Homework also allows parents to be involved in their child’s education.
While some of these points make sense in theory, they aren’t actually accurate. The ways we learn certain topics in school, such as math, is different from how parents learned them. They can’t help with the work because they can’t do it either, so aren’t actually “involved” with their child’s learning.
In addition, students learn to use different sources in their learning no matter where they are, so it doesn’t matter if it is at home or school.
The amount of homework we get right now is too much. The excessive amount of work given causes the whole point of homework to lose its point.
Having homework to practice a skill or understand a concept makes sense but having 50 practice problems is less effective than having 15 because students might just rush to get done.
Students don’t like doing homework at all but when someone is staring at hours of homework, they will be even less motivated to do it. Having an excessive amount of homework makes students stressed and focus on getting it done rather than understanding.
According to a study done by Stanford University, homework can have negative effects on students such as physical health problems, lack of balance in their lives and being alienated from society.
This same study from Stanford says that spending so much time on homework was not letting students work on other life skills and meet developmental needs.
Additionally, students are so stressed out from trying to get all their homework done, they start to miss out on experiences like sports games and hanging out with their friends.
While no homework days are an attempted solution to this problem, They don’t help much. If it is a no homework weekend, homework cannot be due the day we get back to school, but it can be due the day after. Teachers will assign homework to be due the next day, so students still have to work on it or they will end up being stressed doing it at the last minute.
So even though no homework days are supposed to help, they don’t do much because we still have assignments due, just a day later than they normally would be. Additionally there are teachers ignore who the no homework days.
An easy way to fix the problem of too much homework is as simple as assigning less. Instead of math teachers giving 40 problems in a textbook to do, if they assign less, the effect will be the same or better because students would be less rushed to get all the problems done.
